Variable Undefined
by pacphys
Summary: Leonardo confronts a rather frustrated Donatello.


_**Variable Undefined**_

"AARRRGGGHHH!" Donatello's frustrated shout echoed through the lair, startling his brothers. It wasn't often the quiet, levelheaded turtle screamed like that.

"Donnie, you ok?" Leo asked as he poked his head into his brother's room. The usually neat space was an absolute disaster area. That immediately told Leo that Don had been working on whatever he was screaming about for several days.

"I'm fine." Don replied curtly.

"You sure? Because..."

Don hit a few more keys on the keyboard in front of him, making a quick change before running his program again.

"Compile, run... Variable Undefined! It's NOT undefined! It's defined three separate times!"

"Donnie?" Leo begged. "Why don't you take a break?"

"This will work, Leo. There's a way, there's always a way." Donatello may have said it to his brother, but Leo wasn't quite sure exactly who it was that Don was trying to convince.

"Donnie..." Leonardo attempted again, but his brother was ignoring him. He watched as Don went down several lines of code and put little marks in front of the lines. "What are you doing?"

"Commenting out stuff that doesn't work and trying another way." The recently screaming turtle replied calmly.

"Why?"

"Because... it isn't working." The tone of Don's voice clearly said _You're trying my patience_.

"What is it supposed to do?"

Don handed Leo two sheets of paper. Each sheet contained three columns of numbers. He turned back to the computer as he gave his explanation. "These are printouts of two different files. I want to read in the last column of each file."

"They look the same to me." Leo muttered.

"Similar, I want to know how similar. Anyway, I want to take the last column of each file, divide one by the other and save that as a new file. It's not a difficult process... usually. I just can't get the stupid filetype to read in."

"How long have you been working on this?" Leo asked, noticing that Don's voice still carried a rather annoyed ring.

"Three days." The purple masked turtle replied flatly.

"Couldn't you just use a calculator?"

"Yeah, and have it done in about 10 minutes." Don responded.

"So, why don't you just..."

"Because there's ALWAYS a way!" Don repeated, now sounding just a little desperate as he recompiled the program and told it to run.

Leo looked at his brother and glanced around the room again. Everything was in a state of disarray, like Don had been too preoccupied to put stuff away lately. "Donnie, I think you might be overreacting just a little bit."

The purple-masked turtle hit the sides of the monitor just enough to shake it a little. He was frustrated beyond belief, but that was no reason to break electronics... Well it wasn't a reason for Don to break electronics, he wasn't Raphael after all.

"GAH! What is WRONG! It's an ARRAY! That's how it's defined in line 24! What do you MEAN ' variable undefined'!" Don growled slightly at the computer and started in on the code one more time.

"Donnie, come on. It's time to take a little break." Leo gently pulled on his brother's arm only to be slapped away.

"There's a way to do this. I know there is, Leo. There's always a way."

"Yes, well you can find the way later." Leo reasoned flatly, having heard Don repeat himself three times now. "You're going to take a break now."

Don ignored his brother, compiled one more time and set the program running again. This time a column of numbers filled the screen.

Leo was excited for a moment, thinking that the program had worked and this whole mess was over, but that quickly ended when he saw the look on his brother's face.

"Ten to the power of negative 19? Where are you getting 10 to the negative 19? There's no 10 to the negative 19 in these files. Everything is more like 10 to the positive 8 or 9!"

"That's it. You're done." Leo ordered as he pulled Don away from the computer.

"No, no wait!"

"Nope." Leonardo pulled harder and Don finally stood from his chair. "You're coming with me. We're going for a run."

"Leo!" Don moaned.

Despite his brother's protests, Leonardo turned off the monitor and pulled his brother from the room. "Outside, now."

Don gave Leo a small noise of protest, but offered no other form of resistance as his brother pulled him away from the computer. Maybe Leo was right, maybe he did need a break.

* * *

**A/N: **Ok, I was programming for work and... well if you got this far, you have a pretty good idea of how that went. I did finally get it to work the morning of the fourth day. 


End file.
